How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  He was clearly immediately put off by that idea, and I realized in that moment what a mistake it was. While I adored surprises, a lot of Ed’s pleasure in the things he enjoyed came from anticipating the things he arranged so far in advance.

  So I told him where we were going, hoping he could look forward to it for the half an hour or so until we got there, but that didn’t help either. He looked completely bewildered.

  ‘But I thought we’d be going to L’Ambroisie,’ he said, frowning like a confused child. ‘You know that’s my favourite.’

  ‘I thought it would be fun to try somewhere new…’ I said tentatively.

  How wrong I was. It was a disaster from the moment we arrived and were seated at what resembled a very chic sushi bar, with chefs preparing food in front of us.

  ‘Is this a teriyaki restaurant?’ said Ed, looking appalled. ‘Are they going to start throwing knives in the air?’

  He didn’t look much happier when he was given a menu. I thought it all looked wonderful, but Ed hated ‘fusion’ food of any kind, and there were a lot of udon noodles and shiitake mushrooms mixed in with the foie gras and the truffles. He snorted when he saw the word ‘coriander’ in the description of one dish.

  ‘Now there is an ingredient which has no place on a menu in Paris,’ he said. ‘What absolute nonsense to think an entirely alien flavour from another continent will meld perfectly with indigenous ingredients. Ridiculous.’

  It was a longstanding gripe of his, and I held back from offering my usual argument about black pepper being an alien ingredient. Not to mention the heinous bright-yellow curry powder so beloved of French chefs.

  He also loathed having to give his food order directly to the commis chef at the bar in front of us and the wine order to the sommelier behind his shoulder. In the end he asked to see the maître d’.

  ‘Do you think,’ he said in his terrible French accent, stubbornly unimproved, in that English way, despite all the time he spent over there, it would be at all possible for us to have a table rather than sit at this bar? It’s just I am dreadfully old-fashioned and I really like to sit and look across at my beautiful wife.’

  I cringed with embarrassment. He wasn’t rude, but why couldn’t he just relax and enjoy having a new restaurant experience? But then I could also see that, much as I loved it, this sleek restaurant, with its Christian Liagre interior and post-modern menu, was totally outside his comfort zone. I had been an idiot to bring him here.

  ‘I am so sorry, sir,’ said the maître d’. ‘But we do not have tables at this restaurant. Only the bar and the stools. I thought Madame Wilmott would have explained that to you when she made this reservation…’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Ed, lapsing into English, then back into French. ‘Who made the reservation?’

  ‘Madame Wilmott, of course. She is a good friend of Monsieur Robuchon…’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ed, nodding and assuming a social smile. ‘I quite understand. Thank you so much.’

  He turned back to me with steely eyes. ‘Kiki chose my birthday restaurant?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I chose it, because I thought you would be interested to try one of the most highly regarded new restaurants in Paris. We were very lucky because Kiki was able to use her influence to get us in at short notice. I think it’s wonderful.’

  ‘Well, some of the food is very nicely made,’ conceded Ed, spooning up some iridescent broth with a Japanese-style spoon, ‘when it’s not ruined with coriander and bloody lemon grass, and it is a damn fine wine list, but I just don’t like sitting on these crippling bar stools and eating out of a bowl like a baby. I mean, when your country has the finest dining on earth, why would you mess with the formula?’

  I took a deep breath and remained silent while thinking: ‘Because sometimes change can make things more interesting…’

  There was no point in saying it. As far as Ed was concerned there was a right way to do everything – from pouring wine, to making coffee, to making love to your wife. A right way that was the only way, and change simply meant spoiling it. Change was bad and that was it.

  What had he said the day before about having children? ‘End of discussion.’

  I was just starting to hope quite keenly that his ridiculous intransigence wasn’t going to lead to the end of us.

  18

  Kiki couldn’t wait to hear how Ed had liked his birthday lunch when I saw her the following week. I’d gone over to her place after seeing a new client nearby and we were sitting having coffee in her kitchen – now always immaculate, thanks to her housekeeper.

  ‘I thought it was wonderful,’ I said, trying to dodge the question. ‘I loved the interior and Ed thought the wine list was excellent. He had the most amazing foie gras in a kind of Japanese broth, it was extraordinary.’

  ‘Mmmm… yum, I love that dish,’ said Kiki. ‘Did he like my card too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, thinking quickly. ‘He asked me to thank you. He thought it was very amusing.’

  Actually, Ed had opened Kiki’s birthday card when we had got back from Paris on Sunday night and had thrown it immediately into the bin.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ I had asked him, bewildered. ‘Don’t you think it was sweet of her to remember your birthday?’

  ‘It’s a technique,’ said Ed, ‘the birthday book. Everyone gets a birthday card and thinks how thoughtful Kiki is. No, thank you. I don’t do friendship by numbers.’

  I really didn’t understand why Ed was getting so antagonistic towards Kiki. She brought nothing but joy to my life. I always had a great time with her – and I had her to thank for my fabulous new wardrobe and my ever burgeoning new business, which was still growing at a prodigious rate.

  I had the bookkeeper and the eBay people set up now, and with Ed’s sage advice, I had also decided to hire someone to be a basic physical clutter-clearer for me. The idea was that once I had done the initial visit and worked out the action plan, they would go in to do the drudge work, leaving me free to get on with more lucrative first consultations. Then I would go back at the end and see to the glamorous finishing touches.

  ‘It’s the simple economic principle of the division of labour,’ Ed had told me, working out on the back of an envelope how much I could afford to pay someone. ‘I don’t grow or bottle the wine I sell; my expertise is knowing which wines people will want to buy. Yours is having the vision to see the best way to clear someone’s chaos quickly – not actually doing it yourself.’

  I knew he was right, and one of the reasons I’d gone to see Kiki that morning was for help with recruitment. I thought there must be somebody suitable among her ever-expanding group of acquaintances.

  It was just the kind of networking challenge she loved, and she sprang up from the table to get what she called her ‘mothership’ address archive – as opposed to the little black book she carried in her handbag and the new numbers that went into her Blackberry.

  ‘I can’t believe you actually still use that,’ I said, when she carried the old Rolodex into the kitchen. ‘It looks like something from a Humphrey Bogart film. Have you ever thought of going digital with your contacts?’

  I held up my iPhone, which was fast becoming like an extra limb for me.

  ‘Are you normal?’ she asked me. ‘It would take me a year to type all this into a computer, and only I could ever understand my cross-indexing system, so no one could do it for me.’

  ‘I was only asking,’ I said, putting my gadget away.

  ‘Now,’ she said, flipping through the index cards, her fingers flying like a concert violinist, ‘what you need is someone a bit short of the old cashola, who looks OK, is practical and capable, but isn’t smart enough to try and steal your ideas and contacts and set up in competition. Let me see…’

  ‘Mmmm,’ she said, coming to a stop and writing a name down on a piece of paper. ‘ This one’s possible, an out-of-work dancer, but I think we can do better. Not sure how practical she is. Hmmm, don’t thin
k you want an underemployed freelance journalist – too nosy. Aha! This is perfect. Fiona Rembury – a very bored housewife. She doesn’t really need the money, just something to do. Bit of a chalet girl, very capable, and very nice. You’ll like her.’

  She scribbled a name and number on to a piece of paper and pushed it across the table to me, but I didn’t look at it. I was staring at a card on the Rolodex which I had caught sight of as she flipped it over. I held it up with my finger and turned my head sideways to read it. I hadn’t been imagining it. Joseph Renwick.

  ‘You’ve got Joseph’s number in there,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ giggled Kiki. ‘ That delicious friend of your brother’s. So nice of Dick to bring him to the party. Brainy and cute, just the way I like them.’

  ‘You do know he’s married, don’t you, Kiki?’ I said prissily. ‘With children.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re all still in Washington DC and he’s based back over here. Doesn’t that tell you something? From what he’s told me, that marriage is well past its sell-by date.’

  ‘Have you seen him then?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kiki, completely casually. ‘We’ve had drinks a few times. He’s very good company. Didn’t you see him at the weekend? He said you had lunch or something.’

  ‘We did,’ I said, feeling vaguely disorientated. ‘He was down seeing his parents as well, and he and Dick arranged it.’

  I felt strangely unsettled. It just seemed so odd to have someone significant from my teenage years suddenly intimately involved with my adult life in this way.

  ‘He said your father was dreadful to Ed while you were down there,’ said Kiki, in her usual relaxed tones.

  Now I really was amazed. But while it felt like an outrageous invasion of my privacy, there was a small part of me that was quite glad finally to be able to talk about it. But then I wondered how Joseph knew it was Ed my father had attacked. We hadn’t told him that – Dick had just joked about a ‘minor earthquake’, nothing more specific.

  ‘What exactly did Joseph tell you?’ I asked her.

  ‘He said he could tell by the state you and your mum were in at the lunch that your father had misbehaved. He said you looked “crumpled” and he knew from years of being friends with Dick and being at school under your dad what that meant. So he asked Dick about it later and got the whole story.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said, still feeling simultaneously violated and strangely excited by what Kiki was saying. ‘He really did tell you the whole story. You and Joseph must be pretty chummy.’

  She shrugged. ‘We get on really well, I like him enormously, but I think he wanted to talk about it because he was quite upset on your behalf. He said your dad is a classic shortarse mini-dictator and he has always been foul to you and your mother. Is that true, Amelia?’

  I felt tears pricking my eyes and just nodded. If I wasn’t careful I’d have to get my clutter-clearing tissues out.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it was Ed who copped it on Friday. It was pretty dreadful.’

  ‘What did he attack him about?’ said Kiki, taking my hand across the table. ‘Joseph didn’t tell me that.’

  I felt a bit shaky. This was all stuff I thought I didn’t want to discuss with anybody, but now the subject was out I felt oddly compelled to talk about it. I took a deep breath, the kind I encouraged my clients to take when we were close to discovering why their clutter had accumulated.

  ‘He asked him why we don’t have any children,’ I said, brushing a treacherous tear from the corner of my eye.

  ‘And why haven’t you?’ Kiki asked me, very gently. ‘I’ve often wondered myself…’

  And then the tears came. I sobbed and sobbed so much I couldn’t even find my bloody tissues and Kiki brought the kitchen roll over. She sat down next to me and put her arm around my shoulder.

  ‘Let it out, Amelia,’ she said. ‘ Tell me. I’m not being nosy, it will make you feel better to talk about it.’

  So I told her the whole story. How I hadn’t understood when we got married quite how dead against having children Ed was and how I had always thought he would eventually see sense, but now I was feeling increasingly desperate that maybe he wouldn’t.

  Kiki put her arms around me and I sobbed on to her shoulder.

  ‘Do you think Ed’s position is reasonable?’ she asked, when I finally recovered a little.

  ‘Well, I can understand it, in a way,’ I said, wiping my nose and sniffing. ‘He had such a loveless childhood himself, and his only other close-up experience of family life has been with my parents, and that would be enough to put anyone off. But it’s such a ridiculously black and white situation. I want them; he doesn’t. There’s no right or wrong, we just have different opinions – and needs – on the subject.’

  ‘And you are simply going to give up and let him have his way?’

  ‘What choice do I have? Our marriage is so great in every other way. It’s just this one thing.’

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, just sat there with her arm around me, then she suddenly sat up.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something. It’s not pretty, but I think you need to see it.’

  She picked up her pencil and a sheet of paper and drew a line which started out horizontally, then went gently upwards.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘This is the graph of female fertility. That point there at the top is age twenty-three.’

  She wrote ‘23’ and then continued the line again, now sloping gently downwards. Then she stopped again.

  ‘This is thirty-seven,’ she said, and then drew the line on in a downward angle that was almost vertical. She stopped drawing again and looked at me. ‘How old are you, Amelia?’

  ‘Thirty-six and three-quarters,’ I whispered, looking at her graph in horror and then back up at Kiki. ‘Is that really what happens?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s not a gentle decline, like we all think. A friend of mine who is a gynaecologist drew this graph for me years ago and told me to tell all my friends. Female fertility goes into freefall at thirty-seven, and by the time you hit forty, it’s a black ski run.’

  ‘But what about Madonna?’ I asked.

  Kiki laughed bitterly. ‘ There are always statistical oddities,’ she said. ‘You might be lucky, like her, or you might be average, which is more likely. And that wasn’t a first baby, either.’

  For a moment I was too stunned to speak. It was even worse than I thought. I picked up the little diagram and just stared at it.

  ‘How did I get to the age of thirty-six without knowing this?’ I said, eventually.

  Kiki shrugged. ‘You’d be amazed how many women don’t understand how brutally quickly fertility declines,’ she said. ‘We all spend so much time concentrating on contraception most of us don’t know the first thing about conception. Remember all those articles in Cosmo about avoiding pregnancy? I reckon I could have done a Ph.D. on contraception by the time I was seventeen.’

  ‘I didn’t read those magazines when I was a teenager,’ I said. ‘My father doesn’t approve of them.’

  Kiki rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Amelia,’ she said, smiling indulgently at me. ‘What time machine did you just pop out of ?’

  It was my turn to shrug. ‘I dunno. But if you ever met my father – which I sincerely hope you won’t – you’d understand.’ I looked down at the fertility graph again. I still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘What about you, Kiki?’ I said. The great unmentionable subject was out in the open, so I thought I might as well go with it. ‘You’re a bit older than me, aren’t you?’

  Kiki laughed. ‘Oh, I’m ancient, darls – forty-one – but none of this bothers me, because I’m not going to have children. Not my thing. So that’s one little worry I don’t have. It would be nice to have a boyfriend, possibly a husband, but a family of my own? No thanks.’

  Before I could ask her anything else, she had turned her attention back to her Rolodex. ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Here is anot
her possibility for your helper. A very nice actor, never in work, very neat. I’ll write his number down too and I’ll just have a look to see if there is anyone else who might be good…’

  The serious discussion was very clearly over, which was a relief. I couldn’t take anything else in. But when Kiki was absorbed writing the numbers down for me, I folded up the fertility graph and put it in my handbag.

  *

  I left her place feeling really stunned. I needed some time to process what she’d told me, and I didn’t want to do it with Ed around. I was frightened that in my shock I would blurt it all out and we’d just have another big row when what we needed was a calm and reasonable conversation about it. So I rang him and told him I was going down to Winchelsea that afternoon, to be ready for Sonny, who was coming the next morning.

  ‘That’s all right, my darling Melia,’ said Ed, in his most affectionate tones, making me feel like an absolute heel for what I’d just been discussing with Kiki. ‘Go and get stuck into that garden – but you do remember I can’t come down this weekend, don’t you?’

  I had forgotten, actually – it was despatch time for the quarterly delivery of Ed’s wine, and he always had to spend those weekends out at his warehouse in Acton supervising it. Immaculate service was all part of the Bradlow’s brand image, and Ed delivered quite a bit of the wine himself in his current car, a lovely old Bristol.

  There had been a time when I’d done the deliveries with him, but the thrill of visiting ageing rock stars in their gracious Surrey homes and property developers in Bishop’s Avenue had long since palled, and these days I left Ed to it.

  I was amazed when I got down to the cottage later that afternoon and saw how much Sonny had already done in the garden. At Hermione’s suggestion he had worked right through the previous weekend, and the first three vegetable beds were already built, with the fourth well along. It was really starting to look like a kitchen garden. I was so excited, I ran next door to see Hermione.